Entertainment

E-Commerce Site Lets Users Buy a Better Life For Girls in India

"The Girl Store" is a rather jolting title for an e-commerce site, but that's exactly what its creators were going for.

"It's true that girls are literally being sold into slavery, and we wanted to pick up that thought to make [helping them] provocative," explains Corinna Falusi, the creative director of ad agency StrawberryFrog, which designed the campaign for NGO Nanhi Kali.

The site asks visitors to "buy a girl her life back" by donating school materials to girls in India — thus helping prevent the common practice that its title alludes to. Visitors can scroll through a gallery of girls (the images are models, but names and ages belong to real girls) and choose who to purchase shoes, a uniform, pencils, or books for. When all of the items a girl needs in order to be allowed to attend school are purchased, the site displays an "off to school" label over her image.

Girls whose names are on the site are among the 57,000 that Nanhi Kali helps educate in India, a country where female children are often seen as economic burdens and more than half of women are illiterate. Because their families are often reluctant or unable to pay for their education and dowries, they are at risk of being sold into slavery or marriage at an early age.

The campaign's metaphor for this risk, the e-commerce set up, creates an emotional response that has resulted in every available item posted being sold about 12 hours after the site launched on Wednesday.

Extending this approach to a physical setting, the agency will also set up a pop-up store tonight in New York at which "customers" will be able to physically see the school supplies they are purchasing for girls.

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